9310586 Krauss Conversational gestures are unplanned, fluent hand movements that often accompany spontaneous speech. Traditionally it has been assumed that such gestures serve a communicative function - i.e, that speakers use them to convey information to an addressee in much the same way they use language. However, the empirical evidence supporting this assumption is tenuous, and recent research suggests that gestures convey relatively little semantic information. In contrast, the lexical access hypothesis views conversational gestures as an intrinsic part of the speech production process, and hypothesizes that their primary function is to help the speaker retrieve words from the mental lexicon. however, these gestures may convey nonsemantic information about a speaker's internal state, and such information can affect the interpretation of the spoken message. In this way, gestures may play an important role in the regulation and maintenance of social interaction. A series of experiments will explore the functions conversational gestures serve for speakers, the kinds of conceptual contents whose expression they facilitate, the nonsemantic information they convey to addressees, and the role that this kind of information plays in interpersonal communication. The results of these studies will broaden our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying human communication. The methodology developed also has applications in research on communicative disorders in which speakers experience difficulty in word retrieval. ***
